Barry Black spent thirty-one years in the FBI. He joined wanting white collar work, having changed his major and his university to get an accounting degree because that was what the Bureau was hiring. He retired a master bomb technician and a master instructor who trained NATO and allied special forces on every continent but Antarctica. On April 19, 1995, he was one of only two FBI bomb technicians in the state of Oklahoma, and he had held the certification for fifty-three weeks.

That morning he was seven miles from downtown, sitting in an unmarked Oldsmobile with another operator, waiting to arrest a fugitive on a white collar case that had taken him years to indict. He felt the detonation before he understood it — 3.2 on the Richter scale, felt sixty miles away in Stillwater. He drove toward the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building with a small kit bag in the trunk, not yet knowing whether he was looking at a plane crash, a gas main, or a bomb.

The response was never abstract for him. His wife was a federal officer who worked in the building; she walked out at nine o'clock, two minutes before the blast, and he would not learn she was alive for ninety minutes. The payroll clerks he handed his check to every other Thursday, women his own age, were all killed. Craig Floyd reads the names of the eight federal agents who died, each of them since added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

Barry also explains the mechanics without ceremony: how he determined this was a vehicle-borne device rather than an accident, what ANFO is and why it needed a booster, and how an explosive theft report filed months earlier at a Kansas quarry would eventually tie Terry Nichols to the bomb through a cordless drill and a drilled-out padlock.

Part 1 ends where the case breaks open — a 300-pound truck axle in the street, and a reserve deputy who spits on his finger, wipes away the grease, and reveals a confidential vehicle identification number. Part 2 follows that number to Junction City, Kansas, through fifteen thousand leads and nearly nine hundred investigators, to a traffic stop ninety miles north of town for a missing license plate.

New episodes drop every other Tuesday and Thursday. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more at https://citizensbehindthebadge.org.

You guys will remember the

days of paper paychecks, right?

There was not direct deposit.

So every other Thursday, I was in that building

depositing my paycheck to these young ladies who were

about my age, 20s, early 30s.

They were all killed.

(Upbeat Music)

Barry, I'm sure as you started

your day on April 19th of 1995,

it probably did not cross your mind that by 9.30 that

morning, you would be in front of the Murrah Federal

Office Building in Oklahoma City.

So Barry Black, welcome to Heroes Behind the Badge.

Tell us, start off what you were doing that day.

You probably weren't doing what you ended up doing.

Hey, good morning, Dennis.

Thanks, happy to be here with you guys.

Yeah, that morning, April

19th of 95 was just another day.

I was still on the SWAT team at the time and I had an

arrest warrant for a fugitive

on one of my white collar cases.

It was a pretty high dollar case and it had taken me

several years to get indicted.

And it was time to go arrest this one subject.

I thought he was gonna be out at Tinker Air Force Base,

which was about seven linear miles from downtown.

Myself and another operator were

sitting in my tactical Oldsmobile Calais.

We didn't have the vehicle.

But, you know, heard, felt the detonation.

It registered 3.2 on the Richter scale.

It was felt 60 miles away up in Stillwater.

It's windy and flat here in Oklahoma.

So I looked over to the west.

There was already a huge cloud of

dust and smoke blowing across downtown,

just as our secure radio started to chatter.

Back then, if you're on the SWAT

team or a special unit, you had a pager.

That was the height of technology then was the pager.

I remember those, yeah.

So the pager went off and basically, the news we got was

something had happened downtown.

And I touched base with my

assistant special agent in charge.

And he said, "Go do whatever it is you do."

I'd been a bomb technician for 53 weeks.

Our evidence response team was brand new.

This was my first bombing investigation.

So I got down to the scene right about

9.30 and started doing my little part.

So what did you, all right, you get on the scene.

You didn't expect to be there.

You got there.

What did you feel?

What did you see when you got there?

What was your first impressions?

The best route in that morning was from the West.

And again, this type of event was

not common, certainly not expected.

So even though I was one of two FBI bomb techs in the

state of Oklahoma, I was just driving a sedan.

Had a small kit bag in the trunk, but I drove towards the

building as close as I could get without getting into the

debris field, jumped up on the sidewalk.

So emergency vehicles could get through and started, you

know, the, it was a little walkabout basically just to

try to see if we could determine what happened.

Because we'd been told it might've been

a plane crash or a gas main explosion.

And as I mentioned, our evidence response team was new.

So I touched base with them, asked

them to start photographing the scene.

And of course it's just chaos.

I'm sure each of you has been on a scene, but the

magnitude of this was

something like I'd never seen before.

All right.

So when you got there, there was still fire, flames,

debris and people being pulled out.

What did that look like?

Well, it's,

until you've seen one of these large

events, it's difficult to replicate.

Seeing it as a training video,

it's just not the same.

Movies are just not the same.

Cars had been burning.

There were walking wounded,

people trapped in the building.

It was chaos.

And, you know, I was at ground zero

after 9-11 and some other major events.

And those are the similarities.

It's just the mayhem that ensues once those events occurred.

Yeah, for sure.

You know, I'm amazed at the numbers I saw when I did a

little research on this. 167 people died during the

bombing. 168 was the final total because one of the

rescue workers was actually killed, struck by debris

during the rescue work. 19 children killed in the

bombing. 15 in the daycare center that was at the Murrah

building. 684 people injured.

324 buildings either damaged or destroyed.

We think about the Murrah building being destroyed, but

there were all these other buildings surrounding it. 324

buildings, that was amazing.

$652 million in damage as a result of this, the deadliest

act of domestic terrorism in US history.

And

I am particularly

involved with the eight federal

agents who died in the attack.

Obviously the Murrah building was targeted because it

housed a number of federal law enforcement agencies and

the death toll was just so tragic.

We added eight of these federal law enforcement agents to

the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.

And I just want to read their names.

From the US Secret Service, four agents killed, Alan

Whicher, Mickey Maroney, Cynthia

Campbell Brown, Donald Leonard.

From the US Customs Service, two federal agents killed,

Paul Ice and Claude Medearis.

From the US Department of Housing and Urban Development,

from their Office of Inspector General,

Paul Broxterman killed in the bombing.

And the eighth federal agent killed was a DEA agent, Drug

Enforcement Administration agent, Kenneth McCullough.

I just wanted to make sure we honored those fallen law

enforcement heroes as we do so often on this show.

Barry, it strikes me that there were so many questions to

be asked, but, and we'll talk more about the

investigation, but why was the Alfred Murrah building in

Oklahoma City the target of this terrorist act?

Well, Craig, that's a great question.

And if I may go back just a minute,

Dennis asked what these are like when you show up.

Paul Ice, my wife and I knew

him, Mickey, my wife and I knew him.

I have been to a number of these, Lenny Hatton, the FBI

bomb technician that died when

the World Trade Center collapsed.

I knew Lenny.

So these events are personal a lot of times, even though

they're major events, losing people that you knew kind of

makes that response a little more difficult.

But to your question, this is two years after Waco, the

Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas.

I was a sniper down there for that event.

McVeigh had a hatred for the federal government and Waco

was sort of the final straw for

him immediately after the fire.

He was there during the standoff and then he went back

after the events of April, 1993.

And he began telling his friends, it's time for a call of

action, time to basically strike against the government.

He wanted to start a revolution,

an overthrow of the government.

Oklahoma City,

the SAIC, the Special Agent in Charge, the public

information officer for the Waco event.

And McVeigh believed some of the ATF agents that had

participated in that Waco situation were officed here.

Additionally, just logistically, his bases of operation

were out in Kingman, Arizona

and up near Herington, Kansas.

And so I-40 and I-35 intersect just

almost directly on top of the Murrah Building.

So it was easy access, easy in and out

and had some tangential ties to Waco.

As I recall in my research, he did consider other targets

and this was interesting to me.

He at one point seemed to indicate that he wanted to have

as few non-government casualties as possible.

And yet he targeted a federal

building that housed a daycare center.

And 15 of those children at the

daycare center were killed in the bombing.

How did you explain that?

That seems very strange to me.

Well, I really don't put a whole

lot of credence in anything he said.

You know, he wrote a book, which I've never read, but we

know emphatically that he was aware of the kids.

America's kids daycare was there.

In December, prior to the bombing, he and Michael

Fortier, an unindicted co-conspirator, took a recon trip,

drove from Kingman to the building en route to Kansas.

And Fortier asked him, well,

you know, what about the kids?

What about the innocent people that are inside?

And basically,

Timothy McVeigh likened them to

people associated with Star Wars.

They work for the evil empire, so they have to die.

It was a very strange way to look at human life,

particularly children, and he

did know there was a daycare there.

So Barry, I wanna jump in, and you said something earlier

about it was very personal to you, and

that relates, you and I can relate here.

My first five years on the job as a cop, four of my

personal friends were killed in line of duty.

And there's nothing that makes going to work more

personal than one of your fellow

colleagues falling in the line of duty.

And I can tell you, it changes everything.

When you show up and when you're at work, you

are so hyper-focused on hunting that

person down like a fucking animal, right?

The animal that they are, and

it's like you got blinders on.

It's just balls to the wall, going

after any lead, trying to find that guy.

And maybe we can get into the psychology

of that a little bit, because here you are.

You're an FBI agent, you're working in that building.

You and your wife knew those people personally.

It was personal for you.

How did you react, and how did you and your colleagues

gather yourselves, pull those

emotions together, and try to stay focused?

Which is one of the most difficult things that I could

ever remember and experience, just trying to stay

professional and find this guy, even though you are

literally hunting this person at that point.

Right, well, it's a great point,

and I'll add another layer to that.

So just before

the ATF raid in Waco, my wife and I got married.

So we were unpacked for my honeymoon.

I left for 51 days to go be a sniper

at the Branch Davidian standoff.

I came back, was gone to Hazardous

Devices School to become a bomb tech.

That was in 94, 95 the bombing occurred.

She was a federal officer as well.

She was in the building.

She left it at nine o'clock, two minutes before

detonation, but I didn't know that.

So it was about 90 minutes

until I knew that she was okay.

So not only did we know, we didn't know who had died, but

it was obviously gonna be a high fatality event.

So this was, yeah, it was

personal on a pretty broad scale.

And to answer your question directly,

I think, as you all know,

training tends to tamp down that chaos.

My job was limited.

You know, my job was bomb technician and part of the evidence

response team, there were walking wounded.

There were people I really couldn't help.

My job was to determine early

on, was this even a bomb or not?

So I think,

not that I had any special discipline, but

the quality of training comes

through in these crisis events.

You can keep your head straight, do your job, count on

everybody else to do their job.

And that's how things tend to work best.

So how did you determine, Barry, that this was a bomb?

It could have been a number of other things.

What techniques did you use to figure that out?

Well, as I became a bomb technician and through the

evidence response team training, we had done some

post-blast training, nothing of this magnitude.

But when I first showed up, there

was this 32 foot crater in the street.

The front of the building was gone.

Generally, the airplane crash,

you're gonna see some airplane parts.

Just nothing like that existed.

It was evident very early on that this was gonna be not

only a bomb, but a very

large, probably vehicle-borne IED.

And early in the morning, a reserve deputy sheriff called me

over and my partner, who was the FBI bomb technician,

kind of my mentor, and he showed us this 300 pound

twisted piece of metal, which looked to

be the axle of a vehicle, a large truck.

It was twisted, it exhibited blast damage, and this

deputy spit on his finger, wiped some grease away, and

revealed a confidential vehicle identification number.

So that CVIN was a very early and critical piece of

evidence that led us to Junction City,

Kansas, where that rider truck was rented.

What kind of bomb was this, to do that kind of damage

that we described earlier in the interview?

It's just incredible to think any kind

of bomb could do that kind of damage.

Well, sadly, it's very easily made.

It's called ANFO.

It's just an acronym for ammonium nitrate and fuel oil.

It's commercially available for blasters and miners.

It tends to be a heaving explosive.

It makes big craters.

The military uses ANFO to destroy enemy

runways because it'll leave a giant hole,

but it's very easy to make.

There's a very forgiving recipe where you take

fertilizer, mix in a wide variety of fuels, in pretty

close to the right ratio, and you

have this material known as ANFO.

Oddly enough, ANFO is very insensitive.

ANFO doesn't want to explode, so

you need something called a booster.

And that was one of my jobs as the bomb

tech was where did the booster come from?

It's another type of high explosive.

Well, explosives are tools.

They're dangerous tools, but they're tools.

And if your tools get stolen, you have to report that to

another agency, what's called an explosive theft report.

So we had already traced the area of interest up to

Kansas, and I found an explosive theft report from a

quarry that happened to have reported nearly 500 pounds

of high explosives stolen with some detonators.

The same time when some of the

purchases of the ammonium nitrate were made,

we sent agents and officers there.

The responding agency, the local agency that had

responded to that theft, months and months before, said,

"Well, we were able to recover one of the padlocks.

"There are usually multiple

locks on these explosive magazines."

He said, "Four were gone.

"We found one left.

"It had been drilled out from the bottom."

"Okay, good to know.

"Do you still have that lock in your evidence locker?"

And they said, "Sure."

"Well, can we have that?"

"Yes."

So after we made the arrests of McVeigh

and Nichols, we executed search warrants.

One of the warrants was at Terry Nichols' home.

In that home, we found a

cordless drill and some drill bits.

Our lab was able to match through metallurgy some

microscopic bits of metal in the chuck of the drill.

And then our tool mark analysis unit was able to show one

of those drill bits had drilled out the lock.

So that's how we were able to tie Nichols to the theft of

the explosives that were used in

the booster to make this giant bomb.

Now McVeigh drives the truck, this rider truck as we

later learned, up right next to the building, I guess,

very close to it, and gets out.

And I don't understand how he detonates all that

explosive material and gets away.

Well, there are a number of ways

to detonate an IED or any explosive.

In this instance, we believe he used burning time fuse.

Basically, if you've used a firecracker as a kid, kind of

the same theory, you light the fuse and the fuse burns

down and cause the firecracker to pop.

In this instance, we believe he had altered that rider

truck where the burning time fuse

could be initiated from inside the cab.

So he pulled a fuse igniter.

The fuse is burning

through the cab of the truck into the detonators in the

rear, and that's what causes the detonation.

It's called time fuse because you can cut a certain

length to give you X amount of time.

So we believe he lit those fuses.

We have a video from about a block away where the truck

stops for just a few seconds.

We believe that's where he lit the fuses.

Knew how long the fuse would take to burn.

So he drove that device hot

through the next intersection.

As you said, Craig parked in front of the building,

exited, walked across the street, but he got behind

another big building that they had

delivered the getaway vehicle on Easter Sunday.

And he had told Fortier his getaway route was gonna be behind

the YMCA, which was a multi-story

building in case the bomb went off early.

So he was, it was kind of risky move.

I mean, he was lighting fuses

while he was still in the truck, right?

Yes, I mean, we do that on the range.

You know how long that fuse takes to burn.

So you know how much time you have to walk away.

Yeah, you lose the control in burning time fuse that you

have with what we call an electrical detonation where you

push the button and there's instantaneous result.

But

yeah, time fuse is called

time fuse because you can time it

down really pretty precisely.

Now Barry, because of this incident at the Oklahoma City

bombing site and the materials that were used, didn't

laws change after that in regards

to obtaining that kind of material?

There were some attempts to change laws.

For instance, putting what's

called taggants in ammonium nitrate.

Oklahoma is an agrarian state.

Kansas where they were is an agrarian state.

It's not unusual for huge farms and ranches to buy

enormous amounts of ammonium nitrate.

Now, what we learned in this case, Terry Nichols, who

bought 4,000 pounds of ammonium

nitrate, didn't have a ranch or a farm.

He had a small home with a very small yard.

And so the question was asked, to the place where the

ammonium nitrate was acquired, is this an unusual amount?

And I said, well, it is really the only people that buy

4,000 pounds of fertilizer from us,

our golf courses or the public utilities.

So yeah, it was an unusual event, but it wasn't illegal.

And this theory of taggants, the jury's out on it.

It does allow traceable materials to be left over, but

just it's a matter of volume, how much

fertilizer is stolen in that example.

Wow.

So as we're talking about this,

let's talk about you for just a sec.

And then I know Craig's jumping at the bit there to ask

you a few more detailed questions, but

here's something that's really interesting.

So I'm guessing that you were hired by the FBI back in

the day where almost every FBI agent was either an

accounting major or a law major.

And you, in fact, if I'm

correct, were an accounting major.

And so you come out of college as an accountant, you get

hired by the FBI, that was kind of their protocol or

their requirements at the time, because mostly it was

white collar crime, but certainly

the FBI has evolved over the years.

But how do you go from being an accountant to being a

SWAT operator, and then of all things, a bomb tech?

I mean, you went from one extreme,

being a pencil pusher to a tactical dude.

Yeah, it was a strange sort of

path I had through my career.

To answer your question, I wanted

to be an FBI agent since I was a kid.

So I was like 10 years old, and my

little league coach was an agent.

So I hounded him, what do I need to do?

And he was stay out of trouble,

the whole good advice thing for kids.

But by the time I got into college, he sort of realized I

was serious and wanted to pursue a career in the Bureau.

So he put me in touch with a

recruiter, and she asked what I was studying.

I told her I was in engineering,

and she just said, "Well, we're not hiring engineers, "so

we're looking for accountants and lawyers."

So I changed majors, literally changed schools.

I went down to Tuscaloosa where the better business

school was, got an accounting degree, solely to enhance

my chances of getting in the FBI.

When I ended up with a degree, I was still too young, so

I actually had to go into the

public sector, which was not my favorite.

Public accounting was not what I wanted to do.

Stayed focused, made the

application, got in when I was 24.

I was the youngest agent in my class and was prepared to

do white collar crime for the rest of my career.

But my training agent was the head of the sniper team,

and we spent a lot of time together.

And if you've been in the military or in your agency, you

do what your training agent says, you're FTO.

So every Wednesday, he would shoot.

So every Wednesday, I would shoot.

And we became very close friends.

He suggested I try out for

the SWAT team and sniper school.

So I did.

I made the team.

First major deployment was the Branch Davidians in Waco.

While that compound was burning, my team was there, and a

couple of guys I knew came down

and my job was to stop people.

So I stopped these two men, asked them who they were.

Well, they were FBI bomb techs.

I didn't know we had FBI bomb techs.

So I asked, "What do you guys do?"

And I was still pretty young.

And I said, "Well, basically we

travel around the world, blow stuff up."

I said, "Okay, I want to do that.

How can I get that job?"

And again, another mentor, he helped me, somehow made my

way into the FBI's bomb school, the

hazardous devices school the next year.

And then I did all three.

I was a sniper and white collar and bomb tech, juggling

all those balls until terrorism kind of took off and then

spent the rest of my career

exclusively in the counter-terrorism realm.

You have literally touched every major

incident that most people can remember.

You're talking about Waco, you're talking about Oklahoma

City bombing, 9-11.

And I know there's others as well.

Pretty incredible stuff.

It was nothing I could have anticipated.

I was happy working white collar.

If you're an accountant, putting

those cases together are puzzles.

They're international, they're big money.

I did have a case that was on Unsolved Mysteries, which I

thought was gonna be the peak of my career.

But yeah, I had no way to know the twists and turns that

both my job trajectory and the

world would take in those 31 years.

And one last thing before Craig grabs it is at the very

beginning of this interview, you are on your way to go

and arrest a white collar criminal that took you two

years to get that indictment.

And then the bombing happened.

So I'm guessing he was a pretty lucky

bastard that day and he didn't get arrested.

Did he ever get arrested?

Yes, so as I mentioned, I had

a couple of pokers in the fire.

Once the immediacy of the bombing had kind of quelled, we

had grand jury ongoing because there

were other people in the case to indict.

But yes, he did get arrested.

And in an odd twist, the morning we picked the jury, his

son burst into the courtroom and said,

he died of a heart attack that morning.

Barry Black had been a bomb technician for 53 weeks when

the Murrah Building came down.

Before the day was out, he had a

serial number off a truck axle.

What he did not have was a case.

Proving it would take nearly 900 investigators, more than

15,000 leads and a million man hours, it would begin with

a traffic stop 90 miles north of

town for a missing license plate.

That's part two.

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